Seafaring in the 18th century came with a unique language of its own — and you’re probably using it to this day.
Author David Grann became familiar with naval terms and phrases while writing The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, a true story about the captain and crew of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager.
The book tells the tale of the British warship, which set out on a secret mission in the 1740s to capture a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. But along the way, the ship encounters trouble and eventually becomes wrecked on an island off Patagonia in Chile. The crew work to build an outpost, but mutiny ensues.
“On a ship, everything has a distinct name,” Grann told The Sunday Magazine. “Even an object on land will have a different name on the ship.”
“If you were to mistake a term, you would be dismissed as a pitiful landlubber, which is the worst insult you could give somebody on a warship.”
And some of that language, from scuttlebutt to turning a blind eye, found its way into modern lingo.
“I had no idea before researching this book how much of our language derives from the Age of Sail,” he said.
Grann explained some of their original meanings.
Drinking and gossiping
Before people gathered around the water cooler to share gossip, sailors walked up to the scuttlebutt and gabbed.
“It was a barrel in the middle of the ship filled with water, and the seamen would gather around it,” Grann explained.
“What would they do when they were gathering their water rations? They would gossip.”
Speaking of drinking, three sheets to the wind — a phrase describing someone’s inebriation — similarly comes from the ship deck.
“When certain sheets, or ropes, to one of the sails were let loose … the ship would kind of bounce around drunkenly out of control,” he said.
Beneath deck
When someone is not feeling well, they might be feeling “under the weather.” It’s a phrase Grann always thought was a metaphor.
But with harsh weather on the open seas, sailors weren’t expected to serve on the deck when they were sick.
“They were not exposed to the weather,” said Grann. “They were kept below, so they were quite literally under the weather.”
And if you’ve ever turned a blind eye to something, you have Britain’s Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson to thank for that particular turn of phrase.
When he wanted to ignore a superior officer’s signal to retreat, Grann said, Nelson would lift his telescope up to, literally, his blind eye.
To turn a blind eye today indicates a desire to pretend something isn’t happening.
Got to go
Need to make a quick escape? You might call it a cut and run.
In naval history, when sailors saw an enemy ship approaching while anchored, they would quickly cut the anchor line and turn sails downwind.
“Sailing downwind was the quickest way to make an escape,” said Grann.
And if you’ve ever toed the line — stuck to a rule — you might be interested to know that the phrase comes from a literal line on ships.
“They would line up, often, the young boys on a ship, and they had to keep their toes right on the seam,” Grann said. “So toe the line came from there.”
Secrets revealed
The origins of the idiom “cats out of the bag” are a bit darker, however. These days, the phrase typically refers to revealing a secret.
But when sailors misbehaved on ship, they would be punished — sometimes with a cat o’nine tails, a type of whip.
“They would take the ‘cat’ out of the bag, and nobody wanted to be whipped by the cat o’nine,” said Grann.
‘History shapes us’
Grann speculates that part of the reason the idioms became so entrenched is because of the nature of sailing.
Seamen came from all classes — from aristocrats to paupers — touching many parts of society. Meanwhile, sailing crews traversed the world, taking the language to different ports of call.
And while these idioms are peppered throughout Grann’s The Wager, he says he could have written an entire book on just naval terms.
“History shapes us even when we’re unaware of it. So most of us, including me up until recently, were using all these idioms completely ignorant of where they had come from,” he said.
